Please find below the notes from the Elder's Prayer this past Sunday.

O Lord, you are our God. For you have worked wonders, plans formed long ago, with perfect faithfulness. We will exalt you, we will give thanks to your name. 

As we consider your word and what it says about you – your works, your character – we recognize so much that we have to be thankful for. 

We recognize that we are thankful that you are our defense. When we are helpless, you come to our aid. When we are in distress, you calm us. You are our refuge in the storm, our shade from the heat.  

Through our need, we see our dependence on you. When we are sick, we see our frailty. When we are humbled, we see our pride, our self-exaltation. When we are sorrowful, we see our pain, see our loss. 

Yet in all those things, … 

We are thankful that you have made yourself known that we might be saved. You have opened our ears to hear you, opened our eyes to see. You have changed our hearts to understand and obey, and enabled us to endure in our faith during our suffering.  

If you had not made yourself known, we would simply not know you, we would not know that we were in need, that we were in sin, that we were your enemies. We would not know the destruction that was ahead of us.  

But you have made yourself known, so… 

We can be thankful that you are our source of hope. For your word tells us that you will provide abundantly for your people; that you will finally, ultimately, swallow up death; that you will wipe tears away from our faces; that you will remove the reproach of your people from the earth. 

We are thankful that we can have confidence and assurance of our salvation. For it is the Lord God who helps us, the Lord God who plants us firmly in our faith, who helps us to fear him, that we might persevere in our faith, that we would rely not on ourselves, but on you; that we would trust not in our own strength, but in yours. 

For you have spoken in Isaiah that one day we will say, ‘behold, this is our God for whom we have waited that he might save us. This is the Lord for whom we have waited; let us rejoice and be glad in his salvation.’   

Amen.